Wednesday, April 11, 2018

The Adventurers - A Rather Light Hong Kong Heist Movie

This was the last movie that I saw during my flight back home last Saturday. Well actually not the real final movie as there was another one that I watched but unfortunately unable to complete due to insufficient time after seeing 3 movies earlier. Anyway, I chose this one since it seemed like an interesting heist movie and also starring 1 of my favorite actors, Andy Lau. So what was the movie about? Let us get on with it now.

Brief Story Line

Dan Cheung (Andy Lau - Shock Wave, Saving Mr. Wu and so many more) was a thief who was just released from prison after 5 years sentence for stealing a valuable jewelry. A French police detective Pierre (Jean Reno - Léon: The Professional, The Pink Panther etc) who was Cheung's "nemesis" did not believe that he was truly rehabilitated and was very confident he would be returning to his old ways of stealing.

It would appear that Cheung was indeed still looking to do a final score. He enlisted the help from his protege, the very high tech & excellent hacker Po Chen (Tony Yang - Formula 17, The Crossing part 1 & 2 etc). They also recruited another new person for this heist named Red Ye (Shu Qi - The Transporter, Confessions of Pain etc) who was great in disguise & a fast driver. Despite the constant chase & investigation by Pierre, Cheung and his team would still continue with the heist. It would soon be revealed that the jewels would be sold to Cheung's old boss King Kong (Eric Tsang - Kungfu Yoga etc). Meanwhile in order to capture Cheung, Pierre also sought the help from Cheung's ex girlfriend Amber Li (Zhang Jingchu - Switch, Peacock etc) who was an expert insurance investigator and knew a lot about Cheung.

So could Cheung and friends be able to steal the precious jewels? Or would Cheung be captured by Pierre again? Find them all in this quite entertaining heist adventure movie.

End of Brief Story Line

As a heist movie, this one did not disappoint in term of the stealing part. I was pretty excited during the scene in the first half of the movie. It was quite suspenseful and also great to see the sophisticated equipment being used for the theft. Plus of course the tactic & strategy to get away for the heist. During the second half of the movie, it was still exciting to see the preparation for their final heist. But unfortunately, the finale part was a liiitle bit illogical to me. It became rather too much and not making a lot of sense of why it could be happening like that (I am talking about the moment where Cheung was trying to convince Pierre).

Apart from the bit of non sensical part towards the end there, the movie was still good due to its cast performance. Andy Lau as usual was able to show his charm and still great in doing action sequence, while Jean Reno was playing his typical police type and Zhang Jingchu (to my surprise of her excellent English) was also quite convincing. There was no doubt about Shu Qi's performance as she had been brilliant in the past few years, winning numerous awards, but I kind of thinking that her character here was a bit too cheesy and in some scenes seemed overly done (little trivia, she is the wife of this movie's director Stephen Fung).

Talking about the director, I think Stephen Fung whose credits include movies like House of Fury, TaiChi 0 and few others, had done great job in term of the action sequence and the heist moments, but I think he still lacked a bit on the drama part. The humors were quite OK and enjoyable. Plus the beautiful scenery in some European cities where the story took place, such as Cannes or Prague managed to be captured perfectly by him. The special effects were done nicely and the sound effects (even for a movie I saw in the limitation of small screen behind the plane's seats) were pretty good. I believed it would have been nice to see this on a big screen with better sound system. Too bad it never played in Indonesian cinemas.

Overall, the movie was pretty enjoyable if you are looking for a heist movie. It has its great moments but it also had it's not too good moment particularly around the end. It even provided us with few surprising twists (which I did not see one of them coming). So yeah, you could definitely give this one a try and see another one of Andy Lau's movies. Just like my message in earlier posts, it is currently available in Garuda's inflight entertainment, at least for the month of April 2018. But I think it would also play in cable TV pretty soon, since the movie was already around 1 year released in China & Hong Kong.

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Special Note:

I never claim to be a movie critic. This blog only represent my personal view and movie experience. It is not meant to be a smart analysis of the feature of the films like script, musical score, acting, directing or any such things. If you are looking for any of that stuff, other blogs may suit you better.